My long walk took me to Bo Bae, the wholesale clothing market, where city most resembles Rangoon or Dhaka, city buildings in disrepair, murky alleyways and pressing crowds in the busy laneways. From here I followed an alleyway lined by songbirds, found a whole street selling pineapples and then stumbled into the dark, cavernous Nang Loeng market for some delicious boat noodles. Next door a hundred year old timber cinema, about to be restored by the Bangkok City government.
So its come to this: my wild night out in Silom on this trip was a wingbean salad at Baan Ying, and an overpriced coffee on the terrace of the new Dean & Deluca, watching the world going by, and listening to Mariya Takeuchi. 😉
I dropped the chic (and expensive) vintage store Museum of Everything Jinglebell, with its girly and flamboyant fashions, before meeting a friend for a lunch of street food on Soi Ari: a bowl of noodles, followed by coconut cakes made from two kinds of batter (one salty and one sweet) with corn and chives, and sweet tamarind.
The original filming location for the external shots in Wong Kar Wai’s “In the Mood for Love.”
Lunch at the Baanai Hotel, a restored 1920s mansion. I had hoped toot try khao chae – rice soaked in ice jasmine water – but as it was out of season I tried the cotton-fruit-and-dried-pork salad instead.
“Googie” was a 1950s architectural movement centred in Los Angeles. It celebrated the sharp angles and aerodynamic planes of the automobile age to leave a legacy of gas stations, motels and freeway diners designed to evoke the sleek jetset age. Reading about the now obscure movement, I realised that there is actually a (modest) example much closer to home in a building I have always enjoyed: the Esso gas station on Wong Chuk Hang Road, with its clean concrete lines.
Listening to records with friends over the weekend, the subject of Kenji Sawada came up. The fresh-faced and well-scrubbed teen idol morphed in the mid–70s into something much more transgressive, a louche Roxy Music-esque man-vamp in the mould of David Bowie, becoming an enduring Japanese music and fashion icon.
He also starred in two notable movies, the Man Who Stole the Sun, a psychedelic romp about a rogue chemistry teacher who builds his own atomic bomb, and an iconic turn in the sumptuous Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters.
Sawada also appeared in the advertising campaign for PARCO department store, often paired with J-supermodel of the moment and fellow face of the early eighties, Sayoko Yamiguchi. What a time!
Yamiguchi also flirted with Western rockers like Steely Dan – on the cover of one of their albums, above – and the rolling Stones.
Cult 1974 album from the then-twenty year old Japanese “acid folk” singer.
A Bangkok landmark, the modernist Dusit Thani flagship hotel in Silom, will be demolished next year according to an announcement from its owners earlier this week. Its site will become a large mall, office and hotel development. The Dusit Thani leaves behind the Indra Regent in Pratunam, behind an unlovely tangle of telephone wires, as perhaps the last of the great Bangkok modernist hotels (with the prickly facade of the Srifueang building, just down from the Dusit Thani on Rama IV, as another notable 1960s tower).
Hopefully these buildings will survive the massive construction going on around the Thai capital. Across Rama IV boulevard, by Lumphini park, the site currently occupied by a carnival funfair will soon become a massive city-within-a-city mixed use development, much like Tokyo’s Roppongi Hills or Midtown. It is to be called Bangkok City One. Meanwhile, the old Robinson’s department store across from the Dusit Thani on Saladaeng has also been empty for some time, awaiting flashy redevelopment plans.
And as if that is not enough, the vast and glittering ICON SIAM mall will open riverside later this year, complete with Takashimaya department store, museum, condos and perhaps a privately funded skytrain extension, while blueprints have been drawn up for a massive Bangkok Mall, to be the city’s biggest, topped with a water park in Bangna.
Exactly where this flush of construction money is coming from, and why this is all happening now, is a bit of a mystery to me but for better or worse, Bangkok in 2021 will seem quite different from the city we know now.
My boyfriend recently turned me on to “The Drifting Classroom” after it was referenced, tongue-in-cheek, in an tabloid news report on a school food poisoning case. The classic 1970s Japanese horror comic tells the story of a school mysteriously transported to another dimension, pitching students, teachers and caretakers into a Lord of the Flies-like battle for survival in the face of plague outbreaks and other horrors. It is pulpy, violent … and I’m loving it.
The brightly tiled lower walls of a traditional Aussie pub are not only attractive to look at, but easily hosed down – after being thrown up on!
Tucked away in the leafy well-t0-do suburb of Canterbury, and little-visited by outsiders, is the determinedly quaint Maling Road. This well-preserved stretch of early Victorian shophouses culminates in a cafe in the old post office and, around the corner, one of Melbourne’s most glorious surprises: the Egyptian revival Freemason’s hall.
It was a low-key weekend this week, dinner with a friend on the backstreets of Wanchai around Stone Nullah Lane, work on Saturday, and then a film at the French Festival (Planetarium, pretty but pointless) in the gloriously 1960s City Hall Theatre. This was accompanied by dinner at Mak Mak with a delicious dessert of rice balls in warm salted coconut milk – yum!
Sunday was hazily white, with clear Winter sunshine streaming over the Lamma strait, and we lounged on the couch watching Project Runway, with homemade oatmeal with Earl Grey soy milk and avocado, plans for a hike unfulfilled. Sometimes you just have to take it easy 😉
Below: the preternaturally pretty Lily Rose Depp, who starred in Planetarium:
One of the world’s great Art Deco cities, Casablanca.
ilbonito blog 2007 